One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

Monday, May 15, 2017

[As the Spring
2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections,
this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your
Spring reflections in comments!]

On the limits
and benefits of using contemporary multimedia texts in a first-year writing
course.

As I mentioned
in my
preview post back in January, this semester marked my second time using a
First-year Writing II syllabus focused on analyzing 21st century
identities. That syllabus’ third unit asks students to utilize a pair of
multimedia texts of their choice to practice comparative analyses; for some
reason that I can’t entirely remember, the first time I taught with this
syllabus, back in Spring 2014, I used two such texts from the 1980s (the film Working Girl and an episode of the TV
show The Wonder Years) for our
collective practice with those skills. Since this semester, as I mentioned in
that preview post, I was determined to find a way to include more contemporary
debates and issues as part of our class conversations, I decided to go with two
recent multimedia texts that could allow us to make such connections: the film Fruitvale Station (2013)
and the wonderful 2016 “Hope”
episode of the sitcom Black-ish. My
hope was that these texts would help us to discuss police brutality and
shootings, #BlackLivesMatter, and race in 2017 America while we modeled
analyzing a dramatic film and a TV sitcom as part of a sample paper pairing.

We did indeed
have those conversations, but with a limitation that I probably should have
seen coming: our consistent, necessary focus on the writing skills and approaches
comprised by that unit and paper. I’ve written many times in this space (and
elsewhere) about my student-centered teaching approach, and that focus is
never more central than in first-year writing courses, when any and all content
is (to my mind) always secondary to the skills on which the students are
working at any given moment. That’s not something I see myself ever changing,
but it can lead to frustrations, and I certainly felt them in the course of our
film and TV analyses, conversations in which we briefly touched upon incredibly
challenging and difficult topics (particularly those related to police
shootings) but simply didn’t have the time or space to delve into those
subjects at length without sacrificing the focus that we needed on the paper in
progress. To be honest, I think it might be necessary to make such topics the
subject of the entire syllabus/course (as I did with a series of central
readings in my Fall
2016 Seminar on Analyzing 21st Century America) in order to do
them justice while still devoting sufficient time to our papers and their many
related skills and elements.

At the same
time, I’m very glad to have shared these texts, and especially the very
under-appreciated Fruitvale Station,
with my students. Despite my giving them the freedom to choose any two multimedia
texts they wanted for the comparative paper, five of the twenty-three students
chose to include Fruitvale as one of
their pair; all five of them, and at least a few others in the class, noted
that they had neither seen nor heard of the film previously, and that they were
powerfully affected by viewing it and wanted to pursue those responses further
by analyzing it in their papers. Even if we had been able to have more extended
conversations about our contemporary topics than we did, I of course wouldn’t
have wanted to proscribe any particular perspectives for the students, and
instead would have hoped only that they’d be pushed to think more fully and
deeply about such challenging and crucial issues. And it seems that the very
experience of watching a film like Fruitvale,
and then for this group of students the follow-up experience of writing about
it, presented them with precisely such an opportunity, adding the film into
their evolving perspectives on all those topics and many others. That’s a
significant benefit in and of itself, and one made possible by utilizing a
complex contemporary text like Fruitvale.

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: